Oops...

It seems that without new pictures from my pattern bar class, I have been neglecting my blog, which is not intentional at all. I have started processing my first pattern bars into something else, but I didn't take any pictures last night of the first piece before fusing, and I haven't taken any pictures of kilns loaded with stuff ready for firing into pattern bars. If I am lucky, I will post a picture of the first piece, prior to slumping, next week, as it should be out of the kiln and ready for slumping. Other than that, next week is really all about cutting up the several remaining pattern bars I have and assembling those into something ready to fuse, and whether I will get the assemblage done next week is probably an open question since I quite a bit to slice and dice. One good thing is I know the blade is about 1/8 of an inch, which is something I didn't know before, but means I need to adjust some of the marks on my bars that I put on them last night if I want to create thicker pieces. The piece I am fusing now will be about the same thickness as some of my previous work, as I managed to do a decent job keeping my individual slices down to between 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch thick. Of course, all this has nothing to do with flowers, but flowers are nice, especially with Spring and daylight savings time fast approaching.

Seattle Snow

We don't have quite any of the snow they are predicting just yet, but today shortly after lunch we had a brief snow shower that had people leaving work in droves, and the news was reporting that the local authorities had urged everyone to get home early. I left at my regular time, on perfectly clean roads, with no scraping of the windows as the snow had already melted, and managed to get home quicker than normal, so the advisory must have worked, since traffic seemed light.

This is one of the final pieces I did in my glass fusing class, mixing glass painting, copper inclusions, and good old fashioned slumping. It is sort of a companion piece to the other square dish, but with brighter colors. I think it turned out well, and I was much happier with the glass painting after the project was done than with the initial view of what I had painted. Crudely painted flowers in my normal sketch/doodle style seem to look much better under glass, as the painting is now fused between two layers. I may play with glass paint a bit more, but don't think it will be in any curriculum until Fusing 2, which is a Spring class, but one I am already signed up for. I have also been forewarned that there will be more circles too.

The class I started last night is a pattern bar class, and there will be a lull in new work to post pictures of since it is a bit more process intensive than this class. Last night we applied kiln wash to kiln furniture, a process that should keep the bars from sticking to the furniture, and built our initial pattern bars. The piece I am envisioning will combine my two pattern bars with two of the coasters I made to build a larger piece where each quadrant will be different, though two will be very similar in their pattern. I can't say whether it will work and be pretty or not, but it gives me a direction right now, and gives me a good excuse to play with green and orange glass.

Thursday's Stuff

For anyone interested in checking out Davo's writings, his blog has some links to places where he has just published. My congrats to him for the hard work and persistence required to get there.

I was going to go to a glass shop and buy some glass for an open studio tomorrow, but I chose not to since I had nothing designed, so my glass buying would be rather haphazard, and no doubt expensive as a result. I believe the open studios are monthly, so I should be able to design some stuff in time to prep properly for the next one.

I have been posting pictures on my Facebook page that show all the work from my class so far, though my own comments are not quite what they are here. This is the circle image I posted last week, but it has been fused. The bright orange where the other piece had been clear is due to that glass being "striker," meaning it changes into its true color after you have added the appropriate amount of heat. While not obvious in this photo, my nice clean lines between the colors aren't quite abutting each other in many places. I was told this is due to the fact that the upper layer of pieces, while in the kiln heating up begins to float a bit on the lower layer, which is why you can see some bends in the formerly straight stringers that I had placed on top of the piece. Of course, after I asked, I also learned that if I had built my party-colored circle under the piece of clear glass, then there would have been less float and my joins would have been more precise. Of course, my instructor decided to mention that doing that was impractical in a class since it is impossible to move pieces around that aren't glued together if changes in the kiln arrangement had been required to fit other student's work. So I learned a little something, and I still think my circle bowl will be fun. I am thinking it might be cool to make one with white opaque glass on top and a multi-colored layer below, though I would make the lower level fairly simple.

Decisions, decisions...

Pleasantly Surprised

This dish was a lot of fun, and went through many stages before finishing. I think I did some sort of process on it five of the six classes I had to work on it. It started out as a piece of glass we were given to teach us cutting and then tack fusing. Later, I added the color and gave it a full fuse, which melted all the tack fused glass perfectly smooth. The color spots were holes in the original piece. The I flip fused it so the little pieces of frit that looked like stones would be more obvious-- a case of the bottom looking better than the top. After that, I decided it needed to be a dish, so I slumped it. In the last class we learned how to use a sandblaster, so, at the instructor's suggestion, I gave the back a good blasting. The end result is something I like quite a bit and keep finding myself looking at. As a learning piece, I think it worked very well. As something decorative, it is a bit more personal, and will probably live someplace in the house, as it is much more organic than all the line oriented work that I did, which I like, but which has a certain formality to it. Pictures of some of those other pieces will certainly follow, but I thought it would be fun to share all the work that went into this one.

Nice Sunday of games

For those curious how my first real glass slumping project turned out, here is an image I took in the studio-- before is above, and after below. I love the way the light plays off the glass adding the highlights. Barely perceptible in the after picture is the fact the green and purple are transparent, which I think is due to their hue more than anything else. I am very pleased with the way it looks. I won't have before and after photos for most of my projects, as I don't seem to remember to take photos in the middle of class, just at the beginning or end. (One piece I slumped this week would not have made much of a before photo anyway, as it looked just like a sheet of green glass, since the pattern fused into the bottom would not have been noticeable.)

Today was fun, as I went over to a friend's house who was having a game day, so I spent some hours playing "Munchkin" with some total strangers, but met some new people and saw some folks I hadn't seen in a long time. The bridge table has gotten a bit more complex as they have the little boxes now that allow you to bid without having to vocalize, which of course makes a social game that much less social. I was trying not to bother the players too much, but I did ask questions about the bidding box thingy, which just seemed to make things way too formal. I seem to forget that some people take their bridge seriously.

Nothing wrong with straight lines

This is what my typical workspace looks like during glass fusing, with a notebook open to the wrong sketch on the left, though that was because this circle piece was done on the fly and I had not worked out what I wanted to do with it after I cut the circle, which was the days lesson--cutting circles. This is before fusing, but it shows the pattern I developed using the colors at hand, starting with the big square of purple I found in the scrap bin. So much of my work in this class has been geometric, the classmates in my immediate vicinity took to poking a bit of fun at me for all the straight lines, though so far, all those lines have paid off handsomely in nice looking pieces of glass.